HEMINGWAY VARIATION No. 23
Generalist Mahoney, admired by himself for his even-handedness, purveyed postage stamps from the Americas, the Commonwealth, Central Africa, the German principalities, etcetera, without partiality, political or aesthetic, since The All were the work of one Creator, a cross-hatching Dürer manqué in London or Paris or Zurich.
Or The Almost All. Meet a Creator on the corner and sure now, there is a Trickster in the pub across the road. A courier becomes dinner on his way to Kinshasa, and a factotum in creased short trousers and rum-stained vest must make do by hewing some hundred wee slips, as Mrs. Flower delighted to call them, and impressing four dozen five-centime, three dozen ten-centime, two dozen twenty-five centime, two dozen fifty-centime, and one dozen three franc fifty. The mold was a cork from a Moët magnum which had been retained for sentimental reasons long forgotten, incised “5c.”, then clipped, then incised “10c.” and clipped again, and so forth and so on. Keeping his wits when all about him, horrified, were losing theirs, he made do further by rounding the dozens down to tens and nestling the twenty-four superfluities in celluloid between different pairs of pages of a Three Men in a Boat which he then wound in oilskin. Unwrapping this light literary mummy twenty years later, he takes them on the bus down to Stanley Gibbons and taxis home with dosh enough for a garden dormer where the missus can sew in quiet splendor.
Reserved station issue over-runs they are called. Mahoney has seen three, or perhaps two, because of one’s suspicious circumstantials. Besides these and a few other plucky creations, to Mahoney, thanks to his chronic condition, human, the rest were all the same melancholy cris de coeur. Republique d’Azerbaidjan? In a cat stinking garret in London or Paris or Zurich, in face of yet another new, unwieldy, diabolical national cognomen, the Creator of The All, or of The Almost All, becomes overwhelmed with self-pity.
On the other side of the door to the street, where for a few moments there had been a lively prancing dog, the figure of Mrs. Flower appeared, shrouded in a lampshade-inspired blue woolen garment, but as familiar to Mahoney as was the face atop it betwixt a tweed golfing cap and a yellow scarf whose motif, at the moment indiscernible, was leaping horses. When discerned, the scarf had been and would be in the near future, as we shall see, the cause of some excitement. Mahoney’s trousers stirred.
Mrs. Flower opened the door and all was silent.
To have a ding-dong over the door or not to have a ding-dong over the door – that is the question. Whether ‘tis less inconvenient, should one turn one’s back for a moment, to find a browser in front of the South American cabinet wondering if it opened without a key or to add to the continuing erosion of one’s comfortableness by having to keep one’s ears open.
Had there been a ding-dong, Mrs. Flower’s shadow would have leapt up the tweezers, celluloid packet, and carbon tetrachloride trays of the kit bin and contradicted her alarming “Rainy day!” before its din had petered out. Mrs. Flower’s disposition typically was cheerful, but once the door had closed, the last imaginary peal had faded and her shadow assumed the stately progress becoming to it, she continued in this alarming vein. “I’ve seen Dempsey the Abrader of Thighs. More to the point, he has seen me.”
“Always something,” Mahoney replied, Mrs. Flower having brought home to him that, unfortunately, the presence, or not, of a ding-dong was not the most pressing factor in the decline of his comforts. “What do we have this time and with what noxious unguents must our lovelies be smirched?”
“Throwing off the cloak of mere miracle worker,” said Mrs. Flower, “as Archangel Dempsey of an Annunciation sans Halo, sans Embarrassed Dove, sans Ornate Gilded Frame, sans Maidenhead, the circumstances of the loss of which were recounted to you many a year ago when we still were babbling the tales of the separate wracks which had stranded us upon this desert isle of spasmodic delight, the Holy Thigh Abrader spake. ‘Thou hast in the oven a carry-away seed cake.’”
“Jaysus,” said Mahoney. He had ejaculated the same oath back in was it February when the usually churning phantasmagoric composite of breasts and thighs and cunts and fingers and bottoms and mouths suddenly coalesced into the form of kind Sister Marguerite pleasuring herself in and with her habit and his wild friend gave out too soon. Then it was prayer, today plaint.
“The best witches of Talbot Street are asking one hundred pounds to bring their brooms up to snuff,” said Mrs. Flower.
It were the bitches, not witches, of Talbot Street, with their fishnet hosiery strained to bursting, that supplanted in Mahoney’s fancy, still in the thrall of Eros, the bad good sister. Mrs. Flower passed among them in her blue woolen burqa, like the kohl-eyed scholar in the harem. “What were you wearing?” he asked.
“Nuffink but this,” said Mrs. Flower. To here and to there flew the hands of the Venus alle Vongole as she would be in a coat bought by someone who may have been referred to as Junoesque in Arnott’s in 1933, and squeezed.
Mahoney’s trousers tautened.
Mrs. Flower advanced, her left hand now busy at her collar while her right continued palpating her left breast, which perkily withstood the buffeting. “How often have we not said ‘How could they bring little ones into this terrible world?’”
Mahoney knew the correct answer, which was “very often, almost all the time, in fact, for example, just a moment ago” but he chivalrously doffed his thinking cap and nodded sagely. Nodding sagely unfortunately not bringing about a change of topic, Mahoney pretended there was a radio switched on somewhere nearby as he watched Mrs. Flower’s lips move.
“Sure now, and heedless fornicators do make proper parents.” Mahoney’s trousers became painfully restrictive during Mrs. Flower’s finale of staccato bilabials chanted in the mode of irony.
“Quite,” Mahoney said, for politeness’ sake.
The blue drapery behind which the essential Mrs. Flower writhed now collided with the wooden counter like ferry fender with bumper of the Custom House dock and, collar successfully undone, the scarf and its many leaping horses unwound over and above the golfing cap just as the line wound round the mooring, although in reverse. Mahoney was unable to conjure up any nautical analogies for the manner in which Mrs. Flower now drew the scarf up and down her foreside, where it was impeded and then hastened by the elevations beneath, distracted as he was in willing his nimble fingers to become even nimbler as they worked to free his cumbersome wild friend from its cocoon.
At last.
In the electric silence of a working love nest, Mrs. Flower’s lips articulated, improper parents, improper parents, improper parents, improper parents.
Stand clear!
Rocketing backward like a cannon on a man o’ war, lost once more in the Cordite fog of what in ordinary circumstances was inaccurately referred to as reality, Mahoney did not mind that his first thought, as usual, was of the poor bugger who would be assigned the task, and shirk it no doubt, when Mahoney Ltd. vacated the premises, probably coinciding with the vacating of much vaster precincts by Mahoney himself, of swabbing out the populous unborn from the catacombs of the counter’s underside. He had become used to this clownish notion’s intrusion into the echoing cathedral of his vanishing transport as he had to the sudden presence at the bema of a Mary Hick, someone’s auntie from the looks of her, twining below her glutinous larynx a yellow scarf and asking, “Will that be all, Mr. Mahoney?”
All etiquette and buttoning up, Mahoney responded, “Not the real thing, though.”
“Time enough for metaphysics when a piper has piped away our pretty ditty and is paid.”
This flourish of bilabials was lost on Mahoney’s wild friend, momentarily asleep and oblivious, but Mahoney himself appreciated the effort. Perhaps, after all these years, he had found his true love. “One hundred quid?”
“Per pipsqueak,” said Mrs. Flower.
Mahoney turned to a taboret behind him, pulled open a drawer and withdrew a portfolio marked “Detritus.” “Andy Sheedy might do the honors, or Nolan Dermott, perhaps Quinlen the Mongrel. Let me riffle here a while.” Mrs. Flower now stood at his shoulder, the counter having played its role as vile Wall.
Among the full panes of Victoria and two different Georges, sovereigns of Gambia, the Caymans, Uganda, Ascension and other erstwhile Edens of eternal sunlight, and cards of various sizes on which trembled variegated sets of wee slips, as Mrs. Flower delighted to call them, etched by the same hand through more than a century with melancholy macaws and melancholy lemurs, melancholy palaces and melancholy train stations, melancholy ox-carts and melancholy spears, melancholy peaks and melancholy rivers, and portraits of melancholy potentates, melancholy presidents and prime ministers, melancholy soldiers and revolutionary martyrs, melancholy savages, maidens and houseboys, arranged in order of ascending denomination, Mahoney discovered the celluloid envelope (large size, twelve for six-pence) on which the far-sighted Mrs. Flower once had calligraphed “Rainy Day.”
Mahoney withdrew the contents: a pane of twenty of a view of Mt. Fuji rising snowy in the deferential embrace of two delicate clouds and two cards displaying eight stamps wobbling on their gossamer hinges.
Affixed to tne card, six identical silhouettes of the young Alfonso XII, a five centavo, cool gray, ten centavo, sepia, twelve centavo, carmine, twenty-five centavo, Prussian blue, fifty centavo, putty, and one peseta, olive. The monarch’s stoically regal demeanor was marred by a comical prosthetic nose, a paper party nose, a defect found only on these Cuban issues, indicating perhaps a special sympathy on the part of our woeful artist in, in this case, Zurich for the rebel, de Céspedes who, himself, twenty-six years later would be melancholically portrayed with an aggressive Van Dyke on a one peso, black, issued by la Republica.
Above the other card levitated eight elephants of Selangor, four posed on a three Straits dollar, forest green and Creole olive, and four identically posed on a five Straits dollar, fog green and fog blue, six adults, three side-by-side on the one, three on the other, and two adolescents, one on the one, one on the other, impatiently pacing ahead. The two adults directly behind them each bore side saddles of one supposed miscellaneous goods and a tall bundle wrapped in bandages from which emerged a pipe-like cylinder, likely the smokestack of a miracle of the industrial revolution, an engine for a mill that would free an oxen or two to be tethered to a plow or to be sold or to be eaten. The remaining four elephants bore riders, modestly turbaned, bare-chested, the two on the left accompanied by side saddles full of one supposed miscellaneous goods, the two in the center, perched in front of, of, of,
“Palanquins,” said Mrs. Flower. “An odd shape. They’re like coifs. I can’t see that there is anyone inside.”
Sister Margaret was. Then she was gone.
“Andy Sheedy will pay one hundred twenty quid for these,” Mahoney mused. “His plumber, MacCailín, is desperate for railway cancellations. From early June through late September, 1899, the two cancellation stamps at Seksyen Station, one for railway parcels and one for mail, were misput. The clerk noticed naught, think of the heat, and cancelled mail with these rough stripes which possibly, but unlikely, represent railroad tracks, while bearers loaded into cars sacks of rice or tea or drums of palm oil marked with Her Majesty’s tidy round postal receipt. The numeral twelve in the middle stands for Seksyen. Malaysian railway cancellations with some other number number four in Dublin, none bought on the market. Found in grannies’ attics. Sure now, and five quid always comes in handy. Plumber MacCailín, fifteen Plumber MacCailíns, would not have the wherewithal for those. Stanley Gibbons is playing each lucky sod against the others. It’ll get all four, mind you, and fob them off for thrice the price it paid for them to Suffolk gentry who’ll never look at them again.”
“Thrice the Price,” said Mrs. Flower. “Was he an upright chieftain?”
Mahoney chortled and his trousers stirred.
“Tinkle Sheedy, Mrs. Flower, and tell him we just came across a nice pair of Seksyen railway cancellations, the 1897 elephant group in three dollars and five dollars, and that you’re phoning round. And as you do so, if I may, I’ll just take your measure ‘neath this lovely warp and woof.”
“I am no longer the ingénue you first glimpsed those many years ago through the bay to The Brazen Head’s saloon,” said Mrs. Flower, awaiting the halloo from Central. “Sure now, and I know well enough, it’s not meself, it’s me coat.”
Astride a pachyderm’s erect proboscis, habit hiked above her navel, wiggled Sister Margaret.
Or The Almost All. Meet a Creator on the corner and sure now, there is a Trickster in the pub across the road. A courier becomes dinner on his way to Kinshasa, and a factotum in creased short trousers and rum-stained vest must make do by hewing some hundred wee slips, as Mrs. Flower delighted to call them, and impressing four dozen five-centime, three dozen ten-centime, two dozen twenty-five centime, two dozen fifty-centime, and one dozen three franc fifty. The mold was a cork from a Moët magnum which had been retained for sentimental reasons long forgotten, incised “5c.”, then clipped, then incised “10c.” and clipped again, and so forth and so on. Keeping his wits when all about him, horrified, were losing theirs, he made do further by rounding the dozens down to tens and nestling the twenty-four superfluities in celluloid between different pairs of pages of a Three Men in a Boat which he then wound in oilskin. Unwrapping this light literary mummy twenty years later, he takes them on the bus down to Stanley Gibbons and taxis home with dosh enough for a garden dormer where the missus can sew in quiet splendor.
Reserved station issue over-runs they are called. Mahoney has seen three, or perhaps two, because of one’s suspicious circumstantials. Besides these and a few other plucky creations, to Mahoney, thanks to his chronic condition, human, the rest were all the same melancholy cris de coeur. Republique d’Azerbaidjan? In a cat stinking garret in London or Paris or Zurich, in face of yet another new, unwieldy, diabolical national cognomen, the Creator of The All, or of The Almost All, becomes overwhelmed with self-pity.
On the other side of the door to the street, where for a few moments there had been a lively prancing dog, the figure of Mrs. Flower appeared, shrouded in a lampshade-inspired blue woolen garment, but as familiar to Mahoney as was the face atop it betwixt a tweed golfing cap and a yellow scarf whose motif, at the moment indiscernible, was leaping horses. When discerned, the scarf had been and would be in the near future, as we shall see, the cause of some excitement. Mahoney’s trousers stirred.
Mrs. Flower opened the door and all was silent.
To have a ding-dong over the door or not to have a ding-dong over the door – that is the question. Whether ‘tis less inconvenient, should one turn one’s back for a moment, to find a browser in front of the South American cabinet wondering if it opened without a key or to add to the continuing erosion of one’s comfortableness by having to keep one’s ears open.
Had there been a ding-dong, Mrs. Flower’s shadow would have leapt up the tweezers, celluloid packet, and carbon tetrachloride trays of the kit bin and contradicted her alarming “Rainy day!” before its din had petered out. Mrs. Flower’s disposition typically was cheerful, but once the door had closed, the last imaginary peal had faded and her shadow assumed the stately progress becoming to it, she continued in this alarming vein. “I’ve seen Dempsey the Abrader of Thighs. More to the point, he has seen me.”
“Always something,” Mahoney replied, Mrs. Flower having brought home to him that, unfortunately, the presence, or not, of a ding-dong was not the most pressing factor in the decline of his comforts. “What do we have this time and with what noxious unguents must our lovelies be smirched?”
“Throwing off the cloak of mere miracle worker,” said Mrs. Flower, “as Archangel Dempsey of an Annunciation sans Halo, sans Embarrassed Dove, sans Ornate Gilded Frame, sans Maidenhead, the circumstances of the loss of which were recounted to you many a year ago when we still were babbling the tales of the separate wracks which had stranded us upon this desert isle of spasmodic delight, the Holy Thigh Abrader spake. ‘Thou hast in the oven a carry-away seed cake.’”
“Jaysus,” said Mahoney. He had ejaculated the same oath back in was it February when the usually churning phantasmagoric composite of breasts and thighs and cunts and fingers and bottoms and mouths suddenly coalesced into the form of kind Sister Marguerite pleasuring herself in and with her habit and his wild friend gave out too soon. Then it was prayer, today plaint.
“The best witches of Talbot Street are asking one hundred pounds to bring their brooms up to snuff,” said Mrs. Flower.
It were the bitches, not witches, of Talbot Street, with their fishnet hosiery strained to bursting, that supplanted in Mahoney’s fancy, still in the thrall of Eros, the bad good sister. Mrs. Flower passed among them in her blue woolen burqa, like the kohl-eyed scholar in the harem. “What were you wearing?” he asked.
“Nuffink but this,” said Mrs. Flower. To here and to there flew the hands of the Venus alle Vongole as she would be in a coat bought by someone who may have been referred to as Junoesque in Arnott’s in 1933, and squeezed.
Mahoney’s trousers tautened.
Mrs. Flower advanced, her left hand now busy at her collar while her right continued palpating her left breast, which perkily withstood the buffeting. “How often have we not said ‘How could they bring little ones into this terrible world?’”
Mahoney knew the correct answer, which was “very often, almost all the time, in fact, for example, just a moment ago” but he chivalrously doffed his thinking cap and nodded sagely. Nodding sagely unfortunately not bringing about a change of topic, Mahoney pretended there was a radio switched on somewhere nearby as he watched Mrs. Flower’s lips move.
“Sure now, and heedless fornicators do make proper parents.” Mahoney’s trousers became painfully restrictive during Mrs. Flower’s finale of staccato bilabials chanted in the mode of irony.
“Quite,” Mahoney said, for politeness’ sake.
The blue drapery behind which the essential Mrs. Flower writhed now collided with the wooden counter like ferry fender with bumper of the Custom House dock and, collar successfully undone, the scarf and its many leaping horses unwound over and above the golfing cap just as the line wound round the mooring, although in reverse. Mahoney was unable to conjure up any nautical analogies for the manner in which Mrs. Flower now drew the scarf up and down her foreside, where it was impeded and then hastened by the elevations beneath, distracted as he was in willing his nimble fingers to become even nimbler as they worked to free his cumbersome wild friend from its cocoon.
At last.
In the electric silence of a working love nest, Mrs. Flower’s lips articulated, improper parents, improper parents, improper parents, improper parents.
Stand clear!
Rocketing backward like a cannon on a man o’ war, lost once more in the Cordite fog of what in ordinary circumstances was inaccurately referred to as reality, Mahoney did not mind that his first thought, as usual, was of the poor bugger who would be assigned the task, and shirk it no doubt, when Mahoney Ltd. vacated the premises, probably coinciding with the vacating of much vaster precincts by Mahoney himself, of swabbing out the populous unborn from the catacombs of the counter’s underside. He had become used to this clownish notion’s intrusion into the echoing cathedral of his vanishing transport as he had to the sudden presence at the bema of a Mary Hick, someone’s auntie from the looks of her, twining below her glutinous larynx a yellow scarf and asking, “Will that be all, Mr. Mahoney?”
All etiquette and buttoning up, Mahoney responded, “Not the real thing, though.”
“Time enough for metaphysics when a piper has piped away our pretty ditty and is paid.”
This flourish of bilabials was lost on Mahoney’s wild friend, momentarily asleep and oblivious, but Mahoney himself appreciated the effort. Perhaps, after all these years, he had found his true love. “One hundred quid?”
“Per pipsqueak,” said Mrs. Flower.
Mahoney turned to a taboret behind him, pulled open a drawer and withdrew a portfolio marked “Detritus.” “Andy Sheedy might do the honors, or Nolan Dermott, perhaps Quinlen the Mongrel. Let me riffle here a while.” Mrs. Flower now stood at his shoulder, the counter having played its role as vile Wall.
Among the full panes of Victoria and two different Georges, sovereigns of Gambia, the Caymans, Uganda, Ascension and other erstwhile Edens of eternal sunlight, and cards of various sizes on which trembled variegated sets of wee slips, as Mrs. Flower delighted to call them, etched by the same hand through more than a century with melancholy macaws and melancholy lemurs, melancholy palaces and melancholy train stations, melancholy ox-carts and melancholy spears, melancholy peaks and melancholy rivers, and portraits of melancholy potentates, melancholy presidents and prime ministers, melancholy soldiers and revolutionary martyrs, melancholy savages, maidens and houseboys, arranged in order of ascending denomination, Mahoney discovered the celluloid envelope (large size, twelve for six-pence) on which the far-sighted Mrs. Flower once had calligraphed “Rainy Day.”
Mahoney withdrew the contents: a pane of twenty of a view of Mt. Fuji rising snowy in the deferential embrace of two delicate clouds and two cards displaying eight stamps wobbling on their gossamer hinges.
Affixed to tne card, six identical silhouettes of the young Alfonso XII, a five centavo, cool gray, ten centavo, sepia, twelve centavo, carmine, twenty-five centavo, Prussian blue, fifty centavo, putty, and one peseta, olive. The monarch’s stoically regal demeanor was marred by a comical prosthetic nose, a paper party nose, a defect found only on these Cuban issues, indicating perhaps a special sympathy on the part of our woeful artist in, in this case, Zurich for the rebel, de Céspedes who, himself, twenty-six years later would be melancholically portrayed with an aggressive Van Dyke on a one peso, black, issued by la Republica.
Above the other card levitated eight elephants of Selangor, four posed on a three Straits dollar, forest green and Creole olive, and four identically posed on a five Straits dollar, fog green and fog blue, six adults, three side-by-side on the one, three on the other, and two adolescents, one on the one, one on the other, impatiently pacing ahead. The two adults directly behind them each bore side saddles of one supposed miscellaneous goods and a tall bundle wrapped in bandages from which emerged a pipe-like cylinder, likely the smokestack of a miracle of the industrial revolution, an engine for a mill that would free an oxen or two to be tethered to a plow or to be sold or to be eaten. The remaining four elephants bore riders, modestly turbaned, bare-chested, the two on the left accompanied by side saddles full of one supposed miscellaneous goods, the two in the center, perched in front of, of, of,
“Palanquins,” said Mrs. Flower. “An odd shape. They’re like coifs. I can’t see that there is anyone inside.”
Sister Margaret was. Then she was gone.
“Andy Sheedy will pay one hundred twenty quid for these,” Mahoney mused. “His plumber, MacCailín, is desperate for railway cancellations. From early June through late September, 1899, the two cancellation stamps at Seksyen Station, one for railway parcels and one for mail, were misput. The clerk noticed naught, think of the heat, and cancelled mail with these rough stripes which possibly, but unlikely, represent railroad tracks, while bearers loaded into cars sacks of rice or tea or drums of palm oil marked with Her Majesty’s tidy round postal receipt. The numeral twelve in the middle stands for Seksyen. Malaysian railway cancellations with some other number number four in Dublin, none bought on the market. Found in grannies’ attics. Sure now, and five quid always comes in handy. Plumber MacCailín, fifteen Plumber MacCailíns, would not have the wherewithal for those. Stanley Gibbons is playing each lucky sod against the others. It’ll get all four, mind you, and fob them off for thrice the price it paid for them to Suffolk gentry who’ll never look at them again.”
“Thrice the Price,” said Mrs. Flower. “Was he an upright chieftain?”
Mahoney chortled and his trousers stirred.
“Tinkle Sheedy, Mrs. Flower, and tell him we just came across a nice pair of Seksyen railway cancellations, the 1897 elephant group in three dollars and five dollars, and that you’re phoning round. And as you do so, if I may, I’ll just take your measure ‘neath this lovely warp and woof.”
“I am no longer the ingénue you first glimpsed those many years ago through the bay to The Brazen Head’s saloon,” said Mrs. Flower, awaiting the halloo from Central. “Sure now, and I know well enough, it’s not meself, it’s me coat.”
Astride a pachyderm’s erect proboscis, habit hiked above her navel, wiggled Sister Margaret.